The Florida Senate rejected a House proposal to dissolve teacher unions if membership falls below a certain point, but also approved a version of a school voucher program funding private school students.

A judge rebuffed claims by a teacher and two parents who joined the new lawsuit that the expansion of the Tax Credit Scholarship Program hurt them because it could lead to reduced funding for their schools.

Parents and their lawyers said they should be allowed the full-party status because their children would lose access to what is known as the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program if the court finds it unconstitutional.

The judge gave opponents of the law 15 days to try to amend their complaint and come up with another way to challenge the legislation after ruling that the plaintiff in the challenge, teacher Tom Faasse, doesn’t have the legal right to file suit.

The Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which could raise as much as $357.8 million this year, provides tax credits to companies that donate money to nonprofit entities that pay for children to go to private schools.

We’re decades into a war waged by shadowy business interests and religious groups, working through “cooperative” legislators and governors to gradually undermine most of the state’s public schools and ultimately privatize them, argues Daniel Tilson.

The House Education Appropriations Subcommittee voted 8-4 to introduce the measure, which would bind together a program aimed at students with disabilities and the voucher expansion. Senate leaders last week pulled their counterpart to the House voucher bill, but the measure for students with disabilities remains alive.

Step Up For Children CEO Doug Tuthill is shameless about the way his organization–the administrative agent for Florida’s school voucher program–spends lavishly on political races, which may explain why a Senate proposal to vastly expand the voucher program this year foundered.

The decision represents a defeat for the GOP’s Will Weatherford, who was home schooled as a child and strongly pushed the expansion of the system, which gives companies tax credits for donating to scholarship funds that help children attend private schools. Under the bills, retailers would have been allowed to divert sales-tax payments to the system.

Under the proposal, retailers could divert sales-tax payments to the system; middle-class families would qualify for partial scholarships; and each scholarship would cover more of the cost of attending a private school.

Before losing a reelection bid as Indiana’s superintendent of public instruction, Tony Bennett was boasting of introducing a voucher program and limiting collective bargaining to pay and benefits. Bennett also favors national common core standards, which are coming to Florida.

The so-called “religious freedom” proposal to amend the Florida constitution would create a government bureaucracy to channel tax dollars to religious organizations, its opponents say, jeopardizing the very religious freedoms it claims to be protecting.

Florida under the leadership of Republican icons like Bush, Scott and Rubio, and supported by proud and unthinking GOP legislatures for the last 15 years, has happily served as the grow house for Republican policies. The results are stunning, writes former lawmaker Dan Gelber.

Circuit Judge Terry Lewis struck down only part of a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow taxpayer money to go to religious institutions, leaving the door wide open for a fix in time for the 2012 ballot. The case was brought by Palm Coast Rabbi Merrill Shapiro and public education advocates.

A new law passed by the Legislature last year increased the amount of taxpayer dollars available for private-school vouchers, from $118 million to $140 million-money denied the public school system. Some 33,000 students, including 86 in Flagler, are enrolled.

Florida’s so-called “Religious Freedom” amendment is misleading, the lawsuit argues, as it would reopen the way for religious, private school vouchers at public expense and turn the state into an arbiter of public dollars for religious organizations.

Robinson, a Jeb Bush protege, was Virginia’s secretary of education and president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a pro-school choice group ideologically aligned with Republican reforms.